Analysis: Science & Technology — 04 November 2026
ESA Hera spacecraft resolves Didymos and Dimorphos as separate asteroids
Europe’s Hera probe has imaged Didymos and Dimorphos as two distinct objects for the first time. On 18 October its Asteroid Framing Camera recorded the pair from about 1,280 kilometers; they lie some 197 million kilometers from Earth. Dimorphos still occupies only about one pixel, but it is clearly separated from Didymos after two October burns that cut Hera’s relative speed to 20 meters per second. ESA says the first detailed views of Dimorphos are due on 25 November.
NASA’s DART spacecraft struck Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 at about 6.1 kilometers per second, shortening the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos by roughly 33 minutes and throwing debris as far as 10,000 kilometers. Didymos is about 780 meters across; Dimorphos is about 151 meters and orbits at an average 1.15 kilometers, moving at about 18 centimeters per second. Hera, launched in 2024, is the follow-up survey: it will map composition, mass and structure, deploy two shoebox-sized CubeSats, and may later attempt landing operations.
The orbital shift was substantially larger than simulations had predicted. Researchers still do not know whether DART left a crater or changed Dimorphos’s overall shape. Analysis: without mass, porosity and interior measurements, the kinetic-impact method is a demonstrated event, not yet a calibrated planetary-defense technique.
Sources: ScienceDaily; ESA.
Single measurement halves error rate of a bistable superconducting qubit
Researchers at the University of Regensburg and partners showed that one extra measurement before a run of operations can cut a superconducting qubit’s average error rate from about 0.14 percent to 0.065 percent, a drop of roughly 54 percent, and by up to 77 percent versus the worst uncorrected case. The result, in Applied Physics Reviews, used a microwave-controlled superconducting circuit at the Israeli Quantum Computing Center, with real-time feedback from hardware operated remotely from MIT. Partners included Leiden University, NTNU, Quantum Machines and Qolab.
The qubit’s resonance frequency jumped between two known values because of coupling to material defects. Those frequencies are not computational states; they are two tunings of the same device, so uncorrected pulses miss the mark. The team prepared the qubit, let it evolve briefly, measured which frequency was active, and immediately retuned the control signals—closing a loop that earlier work had only diagnosed.
The method requires the two frequencies to be known, well separated, and stable long enough for the update to matter. It does not by itself solve general decoherence. Analysis: this is a targeted fix for bistable “out-of-tune” qubits; the authors argue autonomous calibration will matter more as processors scale and residual defects remain.
Sources: University of Regensburg; Phys.org; Applied Physics Reviews.
ALMA and VLA maps show companion Siwarha stirring Betelgeuse’s atmosphere
Radio observations from ALMA and the NSF Very Large Array, spanning 2021–2026 at seven frequencies from 22 to 485 gigahertz, indicate that Betelgeuse’s companion Siwarha is distorting the red supergiant’s extended atmosphere. The star’s radio outline is more elongated when the companion is predicted at greatest apparent separation and rounder when it should pass in front of or behind the giant. Siwarha itself is too faint at these wavelengths to appear directly.
Siwarha was proposed in 2024 to explain a roughly 2,100-day brightness cycle and later received tentative optical detection. It orbits close enough—on the order of twice the stellar radius—to pass through the outer atmosphere. The same campaign finds a cool layer near the photosphere, about 2,200 kelvin at ALMA’s highest frequency, and about 3,500 kelvin at roughly 2.7 stellar radii. Outer-atmosphere temperatures at VLA frequencies have recovered from the low values recorded around the 2019–2020 Great Dimming.
The shape–orbit correlation still covers limited orbital phases, so more epochs are needed to rule out convection or dust as the driver of ellipticity. Analysis: the data strengthen the binary reading of Betelgeuse’s variability and supply a layer-by-layer thermal map, but they do not yet show how the companion affects mass loss.
Sources: ALMA Observatory; NRAO; ScienceDaily.